


From dust

by CelestialIguana



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Light Angst, M/M, Slow Burn, a suspension of scientific knowledge, featuring searing eye contact
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-05
Updated: 2020-02-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:07:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22578301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CelestialIguana/pseuds/CelestialIguana
Summary: Baekhyun is 23 when the sky rips from its fastenings. It falls not in solid pieces but in torrential storms of dust and smoke and debris, and in the end, like so much snow drifting through the air, there isn’t much left but ashes.The is the way the world ends.
Relationships: Byun Baekhyun/Zhang Yi Xing | Lay
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	From dust

Yixing still isn’t used to the faint scratching that follows him through the echoing steel hallways. Even after three weeks in the medical compound, he still misses the quiet. It was a dangerous quiet, but it was quiet nonetheless. His new home attracts more unwelcome visitors than before.

The white fluorescent lights burn much too bright for the early morning hours and a subdued part of Yixing aches for the dusty red sun that he knows lingers low in the sky. He can’t open the windows, though. Steel blinds lock shut and Yixing doesn’t have high enough clearance to even look at the key. He’s just a med student, not even a full doctor, but there aren’t many doctors left, to be honest, and people will take what they can get when most hospitals are filled with not doctors and nurses but dust and ash and shattered glass.

He’s late to the biweekly meeting, by personal decision to ignore his alarm and sleep in. He doubts the first few minutes will be anything more valuable than a summary of just how much nothing they’ve learned since last Thursday. Regardless of its relative importance, though, the grey doors are still shut tight when Yixing rolls up, thirteen minutes late.

There’s a guard at the door. The one guard Yixing would rather not see at 7:13 in the morning, or at any other time of the day.

Baekhyun, head of security and irritatingly awake for this hour of morning, frowns at Yixing’s arrival.

“You’re late.”

“Probably.” Yixing has dark circles under his eyes, but Baekhyun isn’t looking at him to notice. He seems to be greatly interested in the cut of Yixing’s jacket.

“Not  _ probably,  _ actually,” Baekhyun says stiffly. “They’ve started without you.” The faint scar slashing across the bridge of his nose and cheeks wrinkles with the dissatisfied curve of his lips.

“They don’t need my input anyway,” Yixing mutters. “I'm not helping.” Even after weeks of this, of cold hallways and echoing steps and close proximity to Baekhyun, it still hurts. More than Yixing thought it would, all those months ago.

Baekhyun stands very still. “You should go inside.”

Yixing  _ should  _ do lots of things, including but not limited to eating a proper breakfast, finishing the research he started, and doing inventory he was meant to do three days ago, but what are they going to do. Fire him? He’s needed, if only for menial tasks, just like Jongdae and Chanyeol and Yoobin and Gahyeon. So Yixing shows up late to meetings and doesn’t do inventory. And does his best to avoid Baekhyun. Like he’s doing anything better, standing in front of doors and in the corners of hallways, watching for a threat that can’t break the steel walls, no matter how long it scratches. 

Yixing steps around him and pushes the door open. “Have a good day, Baekhyun.” The guard doesn’t turn to look, but Yixing imagines he can feel the memory of his gaze on the back of his head.

It will not be a good day. The last good day was two years, three months, and eighteen days ago. 

…

Baekhyun is 23 when the sky rips from its fastenings. It falls not in solid pieces but in torrential storms of dust and smoke and debris, and in the end, like so much snow drifting through the air, there isn’t much left but ashes.

It starts as a low rumble and crescendos to a cacophony of shattering glass and a muffled roar, and the world blows to shreds of white, black, red, silence. A strange silence. His hearing returns slowly over the next few hours, but he almost doesn’t notice, the world around him has gone so completely mute. It’s the slight ringing in his ears that heralds the first real sounds afterward, and then comes a wave of voices of which his foggy mind can barely make sense.

Baekhyun is just a college student, and not even a very good one at that. He coughed up enough money for an elite college in a town that sees more snow than people to talk about books he never reads, to get a degree that he might never use, and now, forehead pressed to the cracked glass window of his dorm room, he  _ knows _ he will never use.

Not to say Classical Studies isn’t a useful major. But.

Someone knocks. There’s no door, considering the piece of wood that used to constitute it lies across the room, and really Baekhyun doesn’t think knocking is rather important right now anyway, but the person waits in the warped door frame nonetheless, as if for permission.

“Uh,” Baekhyun manages. “What the fuck?”

It’s one of the mechanical engineers, he thinks. That must be useful. 

The guy’s hair is covered in dust and his shoes leave white ash behind him, but he doesn’t seem to care. Baekhyun thinks his name is Jeffrey.

“Baekhyun, right?” he starts, a little breathless. He doesn’t wait for confirmation. “Me and a few others are gonna try to get to a nuclear shelter that David thinks is maybe fifty miles east of us, and we were wondering if you wanted to come?”

Baekhyun blinks. He doesn’t know who David is, and the thought of walking fifty miles seems. Daunting.

“You’d, uh, have to like. Carry supplies and things, and contribute whatever you have to the cause, but we think it could be really cool? We have some masks to help with the ash and some water purifiers, so…” His voice kind of trails off as Baekhyun staring at him in confusion.

“What the fuck?” Baekhyun says. “What are you talking about?”

“Dude.” Maybe-Jeffrey incredulously meets his eyes. “A nuke hit the city.”

“Dude,” Baekhyun repeats. “There’s no way.”

So maybe Baekhyun didn’t pay as much attention to politics as he should have, and maybe he didn’t know Russia-US relations had been high for the past three years, and maybe he should have attended the technically-mandatory-but-easily-skippable nuclear strike drills his college provided last year, but honestly. Who would?

In the corner of his mind, he’s all too aware of the new reality. But it’s too soon for him to face it head on. He’s always lived too long in fantasy worlds to want to deal with the tangible. 

Maybe-Jeffrey sighs and gestures towards the sans-door doorway. “I’ll be going then, if you don’t want to come with us.”

Baekhyun does not want to go with Maybe-Jeffrey the engineering major and his friend David and their water purifiers, but he also doesn’t know what the fuck he’s going to do as the remnants of his life collect at his feet. 

  
“Have you called anyone-” Baekhyun starts, catching Jeffrey as he leaves.

“No electronics work. The nukes released an electromagnetic pulse that fried the insides. We’d have to replace everything for it to run properly.”

“Huh.” Long lists of names scroll across Baekhyun’s vision, names and places and cities and people, real people, and he doesn’t know if they’re alive or dead or disintegrated into radioactive particles. There is no technology. No communication.

Maybe-Jeffrey frowns. “You seem very calm about the premeditated deaths of three quarters of the US population and the imminent degeneration of the society as we know it.”

A high-pitched laugh rips uncomfortably from Baekhyun’s throat. “Thanks?”

“You’re welcome,” Maybe-Jeffrey says, inclining his head. “You sure you don’t want to come with?”

Baekhyun has very few skills. He can beat Halo: Reach in a little less than ten hours, he can translate Latin and pretend to read it well enough to fool his Latin III professor, he has carried a single quarter in his pocket since he doesn’t know when, and normally, he’s a pretty solid judge of character. There’s  _ something  _ off about this Maybe-Jeffrey, he just can’t place it. And maybe the general air of off-ness stems from the radioactive fallout leaking in through the cracked window or from the knowledge that society is shattering to pieces before his eyes, or maybe from the fact that Baekhyun dreads putting his life in anyone’s hands not his own, but Maybe-Jeffrey, with his confidence and water purifiers, is not Baekhyun’s cup of tea.

Baekhyun exclusively drinks espresso. It’s a requirement for long hours seated at his PC. 

“I think I need some time. To figure things out,” he hedges. “But good luck?”

Maybe-Jeffrey shrugs. “Suit yourself.” 

And he leaves Baekhyun in his dorm room as the world crumbles to ashes around him.

… 

The meeting is progressing slowly, as most of these meetings do. Junmyeon sits at the head of the long metal table, turning his cup around and around as if the rotations will refill his coffee. The new ration protocol started yesterday, and the one coffee per person rule is taking a toll on the typically-caffeinated-but-currently-exhausted Head of Research and Development. No one looks up at Yixing’s belated entrance, although Jongdae kicks a chair towards him with an obnoxious screech. He doesn’t appear to have missed much, so he fidgets with the lone quarter in his pocket instead of intently listening as he is being paid to do.

“As I was saying.” Yoobin clears her throat, pointedly ignoring Yixing’s loudly scooting his chair closer to the table. “We couldn’t cure cancer with all the equipment of the best labs in the world, with the best scientists in the world. You must understand why it would be difficult, to put it lightly, for us to curb the rampant mutations and cancer gone rogue in this glorified metal  _ box.”  _

The radiobiologist is almost hissing by the end of her speech, gaze burning into Junmyeon with enough fire that Yixing’s grudgingly impressed at his ability to sit on the receiving end without withering to smoking ash. Junmyeon sighs, hands pressed to his temples.

“Dr. Lee. I am just as acquainted with our circumstances as you, and I assure you, completely aware of the near impossibility of the task. This is a government operation. My power is limited.”

Jongdae barks a laugh. “How’s the president doing, then? Feeling cozy in his nuclear bunker?” 

“Presumably.” Junmyeon looks about as tired as Yixing feels, an impressive feat. Yixing hides it underneath layers of affected boredom and indifference but Junmyeon doesn’t have the privilege to not care, and it shows in his tight smile. Yixing appreciates the fuzzy static that fills his head and lungs. It makes the sharp edges of reality that much softer.

“Then why aren’t we getting more supplies?” Yoobin retorts. “If the president is safely tucked away, why isn’t he sending his surplus of resources to the ones actually trying to help?”

Junmyeon shakes his head. “I have no control over resource distribution. All I can do is report the lack thereof and hope someone’s listening on the other side.”

“Sorry.” Yixing raises a hand. “How lacking are we, exactly?”

Chanyeol groans. “You would’ve known if you could read a clock.”

“At least I can read social cues _.” _

Chanyeol’s face flushes angrily. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Come on.” Yixing grins sharply, with too many teeth. “Yoobin’s been avoiding you for at  _ least _ a week and you still think you have a chance-”

“Two weeks!” Jongdae interrupts.

“She’s been ignoring him for that long?” 

Jongdae flatley meets Yixing’s eyes. “Two weeks until supplies run out, even with increased rationing.”

Yixing frowns. “No way.”

“Checked yesterday,” Junmyeon says. “Even if my math’s wrong, which it isn’t, we’ll definitely be out before the month’s over.”

“Huh.”

Gahyeon, who had been silently judging the conversation with one leg tossed over the arm of her chair, laughs incredulously. “That’s it? That’s all the fancy radiation oncologist has to say about our impending starvation?”

The static in Yixing’s head burns away for a few seconds and leaves behind more level headed pain than he was prepared to deal with. “I’m not a radiation oncologist, Gahyeon. I’m not a radiation oncologist because I never finished my residency. In fact, I never even finished med school, because a fucking  _ nuclear bomb  _ exploded eight miles from my school, and suddenly I was the protagonist of my own dystopian novel and now I’m here, about to starve to death in a second rate lab fighting a war against our own atmosphere. What would you have me say?”

Gahyeon blinks.

“We wouldn’t starve,” Yoobin says after a moment, voice slicing through the tense silence. “There’s a small settlement about twenty miles west of here. It’s doing well, considering.”

“Considering the very air is carcinogenic, you mean?” Jongdae has never been the most optimistic of the bunch. Maybe that’s why Yixing drifts more towards the young surgeon than anyone else. “And monsters walk the night?”

Chanyeol rolls his eyes at Jongdae’s words. “They’re not monsters.”

“They are,” Yoobin mutters. “In all but name.”

Chanyeol frowns, opening his mouth to surely tell a rousing anecdote of the simply wonderful monster with whom he’d once taken a stroll, but Junmyeon raises a hand.

“Please.” He arduously tries to regain control of the meeting, but he’s never really been in control. None of them are. “We are professionals. They are mutated, not monsters, and we are doing our best to help them, regardless of the equipment we may or may not have.” He pauses to let his words sink in. “That being said. As supplies are running low, and Yoobin seems to have information about a friendly settlement, please do consider plans for when this compound outlives its purpose.”

“You’re telling us to, what, give up?” Yixing asks.

“Nothing you haven’t already done.” Chanyeol meets his gaze unflinchingly, and eventually Yixing sighs and looks away. He’s not wrong. Not completely.

Junmyeon stands up, scraping his chair and coffee cup across the stone floor. “Two weeks. Do what you can. Forgive what you can’t. There’s nothing more we can do.”

The room empties and Yixing follows. He tells himself he isn’t looking for a particular guard, but some part of him still notices that Baekhyun isn’t at the door anymore. Not that it matters, of course. The fuzziness erodes the pain into something with smoother edges, enough that Yixing can pretend he doesn’t feel it twisting deeper every time Baekhyun’s gaze slides over him like mist on the surface of a glassy lake. He shoves it all behind a green door and locks it tight, and strides towards his research lab to make no progress at all on something he cannot cure. The quarter in his pocket seems to burn hot.

Baekhyun passes him on the way, boots leaving sprinkles of dust through the cold hallway, and the pain in Yixing’s chest sharpens for a heartbeat, but it fades in time with Baekhyun’s footsteps and everything is finally, blissfully, quiet.

… 

Baekhyun knows, logically, that he should feel lucky. He has a whole warehouse to himself, one that contains at least a year’s supply of canned and dried goods, one that has only two entrances that lock securely, one that no one else has raided yet. He has a set of knives he stole off a less fortunate traveller’s body that he hasn’t had reason to use yet, and a gas mask (also stolen) he wore 24 hours a day until he found a solar powered generator tucked into a dark corner and got the building’s air filtration system running again.

He’s not one hundred percent sure it’s enough to help with the irradiated air, but he hasn’t died yet. So. Take that, scientific method.

He knows he should be pleased with his circumstances. But how can he be  _ content  _ and  _ satisfied _ when he’s living in a fucking nuclear wasteland?

He hasn’t seen a single person in three months. All phones and computers are fried. He has no one and nothing except hundreds of cans of tomato paste to look at sorrowfully, along with the occasion can of green beans if he’s feeling particularly glum. 

It had taken him a day to finally leave his dorm, feeling powerful and safe with a particularly ugly gas mask covering his face. He was walking all of five minutes until a girl robbed him at gunpoint of the three granola bars he had in his pocket. Then she headed off in the opposite direction and completely missed out on discovering Baekhyun’s wonderful warehouse.

Baekhyun hopes she chokes on those dry granola bars.

He lies back on his bed of Jet-Puffed Jumbo Marshmallows and stares up at the dim ceiling. If this were a video game, the tutorial would be over and he’d be given a quest by some generic character in need of assistance. And then Baekhyun would help, and succeed, and win a prize, because he is the best at video games and they were  _ simple.  _ Here there are no conveniently placed guides, no mini maps, no storylines. He doesn’t have a class or a special power or levels. Here he is Baekhyun, college student, lord of Jet-Puffed Jumbo Marshmallows and canned green beans, ruler of the single coin hiding in his pocket, and he doesn’t know what to do.

There’s a scratch at the door.

Baekhyun jerks up, shin slamming into a metal shelf and sending cans of vegetables rolling across the floor. For a minute, the silence is complete. And then it’s not.

The light taps are coming from what Baekhyun completely arbitrarily calls the back door, simply because he uses it less.

“Hello?” he calls quietly as he gets gingerly to his feet. There’s no way his voice penetrates the metal.

He tries an  _ Hola? _ next, just for the hell of it. The door has an inlaid panel that slides open to reveal a small rectangular window, but Baekhyun’s never opened it. 

The scratching stops as Baekhyun approaches, and then restarts with renewed vigor. Whatever’s behind the door can hear his footsteps through a solid layer of metal, and that, combined with the aggressive scraping against the door, is not helping Baekhyun’s already fried nerves.

With tentative fingers he slides the panel open gently, holding his breath. There’s nothing outside, nothing eye level with the door, nothing in the distance, nothing he can make out in the grey twilight, and the scratching stops for a heartbeat.

A breath of silence, during which Baekhyun imagines he can hear something else inhale. And just as he leans closer to the small opening, a wrinkled, claw-like hand slices across his nose like burning fire, blood and dirt under the nails, and something his eyes barely recognize as a human face swims into the dusty window of light, thin lips bared around crooked teeth. Baekhyun shrieks and tastes iron on his lips, slamming the panel closed on the twisting arm and landing hard on the stone floor.

“Fuck!” There’s blood dripping off his chin and his face burns but at least the arm has withdrawn from the door and the personmonsterhuman  _ thing  _ has left, if the lack of scratching means anything. He thinks his heart stops for a second.

With shaking hands he tries to wipe the blood from his face but only succeeds in irritating the cut. He doesn’t think he has any first aid supplies. The level of fucked he’s in has only just started to sink in, and Baekhyun’s stomach drops.

There are monsters. There are monsters with the face of people but the minds of rabid beasts and maybe no hearts at all. There are monsters created by, Baekhyun assumes, the radiation hanging heavy in the air, the most fundamental aspects of their being mutated beyond repair. 

Baekhyun looks at the blood on his hands and tastes it on his lips, feels heat like a bonfire rising in his chest, and kicks a can of tomatoes across the floor with a guttural scream. Then he does the same to the green beans, and then to the Jet-Puffed Jumbo Marshmallows, although with significantly less satisfaction. Then he slumps to the ground and puts his head in his hands, gasping for some semblance of breath in a world whose air wants to turn him into  _ that.  _

His ragged gasps turn warped laughter, shoulders shaking as he hugs his knees. There are monsters, yes, but there have always been monsters. What’s a couple thousand more? The image of the thing torn apart by its own DNA haunts his mind, yellow cat eyes and bubbled skin and stringy clumps of hair.

There are monsters that walk the dusky, irradiated nights, but Baekhyun isn’t all that nice of a person either, and fuck the world if it thinks he’s going to curl up and die surrounded by canned vegetables. He eyes his gas mask skeptically.

In another world, he played video games until his fingers cramped. In another world, he tempered his ache for adventure with fantasy like millions of others, and satisfied himself with in-game storylines. 

It’s unhealthy, of course. By any standard.

But the world is sick, too. Baekhyun’s just– adapting. 

… 

Yixing’s lab is just as he left it two days ago, before he took an unsanctioned vacation and spent too many hours loitering around Jongdae’s bench, which has the advantage of being away from his work (that’s progressing about as quickly as a glacier) and off limits to Baekhyun, who seems to enjoy catching him off guard.

Technically the head of security is allowed anywhere in the compound, but Jongdae is scary sometimes– all the time– and typically remains undisturbed. By everyone except Yixing, with whom he enjoys discussing matters of the depressing nature. Like life and death and the lack of anything in between.

But Jongdae’s too busy right now even for Yixing, even for his pleading eyes, so he slumps further into his chair and hopes no one looks through the barred window to see just how parasitic he’s being.

He idly fidgets with an empty petri dish, letting it roll back and forth across the cluttered lab bench.

It’s not that he doesn’t  _ want  _ to help. He used to. He used to want to help so badly it consumed his every breath and suffused his touch. It’s just– can he? Who was he to think he could? That a med student could cure what decades of science could not. This line of thought used to bring with it sharp pains, but the white noise filling his brain has since dulled it to a more manageable ache. Everything’s a little more manageable now that he has almost nothing to manage. 

Except his research. What an inconveniently circuitous chain of reasoning.

A knock on the door rudely interrupts his carefully cultivated somber mood, and even without looking up Yixing knows who it is, because he only knows one person who knocks and doesn’t even wait for a response before walking in.

Baekhyun shuts the door behind him and takes a seat at the lab bench ( _ Yixing’s  _ lab bench, how proprietary), feet tucked under him. He never sat like that before, even behind the minimal protection of that scratched green door. But the past is lost in dust and what sits before him now is not the same person.

“How’s your research going?”

Of course he asks the wrong question.

“Fine,” Yixing replies stiffly, nails tapping against the plastic dish. “How’s your hunting going?”

Baekhyun visibly flinches at the phrase but forces an approximation of a grin, the pale scar across his nose crinkling slightly. He almost succeeds. “It’s going. Not many near the compound today. Only had to scare off a few who wandered too close.”

“Glad you’re here to protect us from the monsters.”

Baekhyun hesitates, takes a slow breath. “You know, Yixing, I never thought they were monsters– at least, not any more monstrous than us.”

Yixing blinks. “I suppose that makes us just as bad.”

“Well.” Baekhyun shifts in his seat, looking anywhere but at Yixing. “We  _ are _ trying to help. Somewhat.”

“Somewhat,” Yixing scoffs. “Are we?”

“Aren’t we?”

“I used to think we were.”

There’s a heartbeat of silence, during which Yixing flicks the petri dish off the too-smooth table and it hits the ground with a clatter. Baekhyun tenses almost imperceptibly at the sudden noise. To others, it would’ve been unnoticeable. But Yixing knows his tells.

“I’ve been thinking,” Baekhyun begins, hesitantly. “About her. The girl, I mean.” Of course Yixing knows who – what – he means. Of course.

“And- I don’t regret what I did. I don’t. I still think it was the best choice. Given the situation. But, Yixing, there are ways to help, to  _ actually  _ help-” he gestures haltingly to the surroundings. The derelict lab. “-outside of this steel box. Where we can help people who aren’t already lost. Children, even.”

Yixing hums noncommittally, no longer listening. He’s heard it before. Baekhyun’s said it before. His mind is in the past, with the girl, the small house with a green door, and infinities of dust. Ashes to ashes, everyone falls. The girl only fell once, though, and Yixing keeps falling, through green doors and grey smoke and everything that was  _ before _ . 

… 

Is it really too much for Baekhyun to ask for the wannabe zombies to stand still? Their unpredictable shambling doesn’t so much make for decreased accuracy as it does more noise, which inevitably attracts more of their kind, and that’s something he could live without. His accuracy is top notch regardless, thanks very much. Baekhyun’s always had a marksman's eye.

He also has a stolen gun, stolen from someone whose decaying limbs splayed across the gravelly road spoke to how well they knew how to use it. It seems old, but it shoots and reloads well, and Baekhyun doesn’t know much about real world guns anyway. What works, works.

Little works, things being as they are. In the past six months Baekhyun’s seen maybe a total of ten people. None stopped to talk. Gas masks are fairly hostile to casual conversation, it seems.

Baekhyun colored his white with some paint he hopes wasn’t irradiated. The apocalypse doesn’t mean fashion has to die along with society’s hopes and dreams.

He drops the monster with a single shot, its surprised gasp misting in the cold, dusty air. Days are colder now that the sky is perpetually darkened with the ashes of a thousand cities, and on particularly bad days, Baekhyun doesn’t see the sun until noon.

It’s easier to focus on the weather than it is to think on the fact that the things he kills are still alive. Somewhat. What is alive, anyway? They eat what they can find, weeds and small rodents and sometimes Baekhyun finds their grey lips streaked with ashes, they sleep where they want, and they wander, without direction.

By all accounts, Baekhyun does the same. 

They kill, and so does he. They kill because they must but there was a point, long ago, where there was no  _ must.  _ Where someone made a choice. But that doesn’t matter now.

Maybe they aren’t monsters and maybe Baekhyun is as alive as they pretend to be but he has to tell himself that they are and he is  _ not _ . This can all be a game if he ignores the bodies that linger even after he leaves, if he ignores the heavy weight of the gun in his hand and the scent of gunmetal.

The monsters are all different, not that this fact makes killing them any easier. The radiation has twisted their DNA into bastardizations of what they used to be, and Baekhyun has seen all types. Men with yellow cat’s eyes that reflect light, boys with fingers the length of their forearms, girls who tear into squirrels with three rows of teeth. It’s as if nature has extended her talons deep into the air and soil and blood and snapped an important connection somewhere.

Baekhyun thinks something is snapping inside of him, too, albeit slower. More of a dissipation. But he has a lifeline, one that came through a static-y, crackling handheld radio that Baekhyun suspects someone hid underground during the first electromagnetic surges, if it’s mostly functioning antennae is anything to go by.

It had started off as a hum in the background of his sense, barely noticeable, but grew to a steady recitation of a string of numbers Baekhyun finally realized were coordinates. And then he had to find a paper map. And then he had to figure out how to read a paper map. It’s a process.

But he thinks he’s getting close. He skirted the perimeter of a ruined town a few days ago, and, if he is reading the map right, the town is at the intersection of the coordinates he’s looking for.

He doesn’t like to think about the town, with its ash-stained bricks and shattered windows and cracked pavement, dust and rubble and stone collapsing into a landscape already consumed by twisting weeds.

So instead Baekhyun focuses on the rolling hills spreading for miles before him, on the tiny shape that could be a house hovering in the distance. If he tilts his head right, the sound of the wind filters through his gas mask, and the sound of–

Footsteps?

Baekhyun whips around just in time to feel the vibrations of the monster’s too-sharp fingernails scrape jarringly across his mask and his heart jumps in response, the world around him slowing to a crawl. He watches the flecks of paint flutter to the ground. Then the monster shrieks and the scream sunders the world in half and Baekhyun stumbles back, arms reflexively coming up to protect his face.

But he’s too slow and the monster is so, so fast (if Baekhyun had time he’s sure he would have seen thin, wiry legs, muscles in places there were never muscles before, spurs on the bottom of the feet) and really Baekhyun never had a chance in hand-to-hand combat. His head slams into grass and stone before he can regain his balance.

The monster screams again, ear-splitting, heart-rending, black spots spinning in front of Baekhyun’s vision until his eyes roll back in his head.

The last thing Baekhyun has conscious memory of is hoping this monster isn’t one with sharp teeth, or a propensity for death. That this monster isn’t as monstrous as him.

… 

Three days until the last of the rations run out. Yixing estimates only about half the original staff remains, and most of those are packing this minute to leave in the next few days. He considers packing, not that he has much more than a few cursory changes of clothes, but in the end decides that sulking in a darkened laboratory is much more his speed than actually doing something productive.

Of course, his sulking never goes uninterrupted. Isn’t the head of security supposed to have important work? More important than disrupting Yixing’s scheduled moping session?

“I thought I’d find you here.”

“You have a knack for finding me, don’t you?”

Baekhyun grins. It’s a small one, barely there. “I’d say you found me first. On my back in the dust, concussed.”

He hadn’t been concussed, just over dramatic and dizzy, but Yixing doesn’t care to correct him. For a minute they sit in silence, Baekhyun’s eyes unreadable in the low light. But Baekhyun could never stand silence like Yixing could.

“Are you planning on leaving?” He used to wear a ring on his left index finger, and his hands still twitch to its ghost presence in his anxiety. Yixing doesn’t think Baekhyun even knows he does it.

“I suppose I’ll have to. Nothing to eat here soon except agar.”

Baekhyun waits for a few more seconds, as if hoping Yixing will continue the conversation, as any polite, socially adept person might. Yixing does not.

He sighs. “Where will you go?”

Where will  _ you  _ go? But Yixing doesn’t ask that. So instead he shrugs. “I guess I’ll follow Jongdae to that settlement. Can’t hurt.”

Yixing makes the mistake of letting his gaze rest in the shadows of Baekhyun’s sharp face for a second too long, and when Baekhyun looks up he makes eye contact and suddenly the static recedes in a tidal wave of piercing emotion. Cities of dust and ruin and green doors and Baekhyun in the foreground, always, smile visible in his eyes even with his mouth covered by a white gas mask, four jagged lines streaked across the face plate. The lesson here being, it  _ could  _ hurt, but Yixing isn’t willing to face that reality until he has completely burned the one sitting before him to ash. 

“The settlement is supposed to be quite modern,” Baekhyun says. He doesn’t sound pleased, though. “It even has a few electronics still running. You’d like it.”

“I guess I would.”

Baekhyun’s mouth turns down at the corners as he tries to hide his obvious annoyance at Yixing’s noncompliance with normal conversation standards. “I’m going to go back to the hills,” he finally mutters, when Yixing doesn’t ask. “To the house.”

He could say  _ our house,  _ but he doesn’t. Anyway, it was Yixing’s before it was his.

“And you could come with me, if you decide the settlement isn’t what you’re looking for. Or even if it is. You could visit.”

Yixing can’t stop the smile that escapes onto his lips at the thought of Baekhyun inviting him over, as if house visits are a thing people do nowadays. “Would you cook for me?”

“Maybe,” Baekhyun says. “If you ask nicely.”

“You’d cook for me either way.”

Baekhyun grins a little. “Probably. You could bring whoever you meet in the settlement, and we could have some kind of party, almost.”

The smile slips from Yixing’s face. Not because of the party. Parties are fine. Yixing loves a good party, as long as safe party procedure is implemented. But–

“I’ve been thinking about what you said. Last time you so rudely interrupted my research.”

Baekhyun scoffs. “Like any research is happening here.”  
  
“The fact that _you,_ a non-doctor, can not _visibly see_ any research occurring does not mean that there isn’t, in fact, any research happening.” Yixing dares him to contest the point. Baekhyun wisely does not.

Yixing clears his throat, pleased. “As I was saying. I was considering what you said, about the helping, and I agree.”

“You agree?” Shock colors Baekhyun’s voice and his eyes widen. “You think, at the settlement—”

“–I think it’s a possibility,” Yixing says. “I think I’d like to do something better, and I think anything would be better than what I’m doing now.” He gestures half-heartedly at Baekhyun. “At least you’re making the world a little safer.”

“I don’t enjoy it, though.”

“You always seemed like you did.” Yixing remembers those days like they were yesterday, colored red and gold with dusty sunlight and bloody dust, and he remembers Baekhyun taking aim with steady hands and pulling the trigger like he pulled the quarter from behind Yixing’s ear in a show of magic. Coins aren’t worth much now. He probably wouldn’t be able to sell it anywhere. 

Baekhyun grimaces. “I used to tell myself I did, because I was young and impressionable and  _ so fucking scared,  _ Yixing, and I didn’t know how else to survive when everything was falling to pieces. Look at yourself, right now, and tell me you haven’t found your own way of coping.”

Hot anger gathers inside Yixing’s chest and dissipates in seconds. He isn’t wrong. Yixing though he could defeat the disease, he put everything into hoping he could, and when he couldn’t, not much of himself was left. It’s coming back now, slowly. Bit by bit. The string, rewinding. The girl is dead. She was dead long before they found her. 

Yixing looks up and purposefully meets Baekhyun’s gaze. “I think I would like to help.” Baekhyun opens his mouth but Yixing barrels on. “And, if you would be willing, I think I would like to do it with you.”

Baekhyun is speaking before the words have even left Yixing’s lips. “Of course,” he breathes. “Of course I’d be willing.”

And maybe it’s strange how quickly Yixing forgives. But it was never only Baekhyun at fault– the girl with no name was the breaking point for them both, and it’s been months since. Time heals, mostly. There may always be cracks, but Yixing welcomes them. They make him feel. They force him to run his fingers over the jagged edges and bleed, because he can’t heal before he acknowledges the wounds.

He must have rubbed the face off the quarter that sits heavy in his pocket by now, but maybe Baekhyun still might like it back?

Taking it out, he offers the coin up. Baekhyun frowns in confusion. “I never gave this back,” Yixing explains. “You’ve kept it for so long, it must be important.”

Baekhyun shakes his head softly. “It’s twenty-five cents, Yixing, in a world that has no use for metal coinage except to melt as scrap metal. I was probably going to do laundry before the bombs fell. Why would I need it?”

“Then it doesn’t matter to you?”

“Well,” Baekhyun hedges. “Just because it doesn’t have any material value doesn’t mean it can’t  _ matter.  _ I happen to think it matters very much.”

Yixing has no response, so he shoves it deep in his pocket. A thin rectangle of golden light passes over Baekhyun’s face, and with a start, Yixing realizes that someone has opened the windows. 

… 

When Baekhyun wakes up, he is lying in an unfamiliar bed. It’s a strange feeling, lying in a bed after having gone without for so long. It is going to ruin him for all other forms of sleep once he leaves, he can already tell.

As the rest of him wakes up, the drums beating behind his eyes let him know exactly how hard he hit the ground, and he can feel bruises blossoming on his wrists and arms even against the soft sheets.  _ Sheets.  _ His savior has  _ sheets.  _

The room blurs in and out of focus. It’s very clean, which strikes Baekhyun as odd. It’s also very  _ green.  _ There are plants. Everywhere. He can identify a few cacti, an assortment of succulents, aloe vera, and some long, spidery plants he doesn’t know the name of but hopes aren’t poisonous. 

And then he realizes he isn’t wearing his gas mask.

What follows is an embarrassing display of frantic thrashing as Baekhyun covers his nose and mouth with one hand (not that it would help much) and casts around with the other for the white mask he knows must be sitting somewhere nearby, because why would anyone take off his mask for anything other than maybe five minutes, how could they condemn him to such a terrible death in this fashion–

At that thought he stops searching for the mask and runs his hands down his arms, chest, hands, legs, checking for strange bumps or bone spurs or extra limbs, he doesn’t fucking know–

“Hey.” A soft voice cuts through his panic and a hand grabs his shoulder, pressing him back into the pillow. “You’re going to hurt your head again.”

Baekhyun hisses. “You’ve killed me, idiot, the radiation– ”

“– will not hurt you here.” He gestures to the veritable garden that adorns his house. “These plants are cleaning the air. You’re safe.”

After a tense moment of silence, Baekhyun allows his body to relax into the luxury of the mattress and takes a minute to actually look at the man speaking. He almost cries at the sight of a human face, unobscured by a grotesque gas mask.

“I’m Yixing,” he says, extending a hand. He has dark hair and sharp eyes and is very, very pretty.

Baekhyun blinks dark spots from his eyes and shakes the offered hand. “Baekhyun.”

“You are quite dumb, Baekhyun, to imagine you could walk through these hills unscathed. They are adept at hiding in the tall grass.” As he talks, Yixing straightens the twisted sheets and rights the small succulent that had toppled off the bedside table, moving around the small cabin as if he has lived here all his life.

“I shot one of the monsters,” he protests. “I didn’t hear the other until it was too late.”

Yixing seems to frown at  _ monster,  _ but perhaps he imagines it.

“Regardless. Thank you. For saving me. I was worried it was going to eat me.”

Now he’s sure Yixing is frowning. “They rarely eat people, I’ve found. More often they hunt the small rodents that live in the grass.”

Baekhyun sits up, resting against the rough wooden wall. “Are you some kind of explorer then? Doing field research?”

Yixing tilts his head and surveys him skeptically. “I’m a doctor,” he says. “Sort of. I’ve been here for five months now, and I’m set to return to the medical compound in three months time.”

“There’s a compound? Near here?” Some form of society must remain, then.

Yixing nods. “About thirty miles west of the river bend. We get supplies from the government. They hope we’ll find some kind of cure for the acute radiation poisoning, or at least some kind of protection from it.”

Baekhyun turns this knowledge over in his head. There are actually organized groups of people trying to help. People like Yixing still exist. It somehow doesn’t make him feel better. 

In the ensuing silence, Yixing makes the offer that changes the course of his life irreparably.

“You can stay until then, if you like?”

Baekhyun takes a breath of the clean air and meets Yixing’s cutting smile with one of his own. Why would he turn down an offer like that?

The next three months pass in snapshots and bursts of color, painted white and gold with ash and sunlit dust. Yixing tends to wear grey, grey clothes and grey mask, and if not for his black hair, Baekhyun might have lost him time and time again between the fallen cities and rubble. He doesn’t know what Yixing’s looking for in the bones of society, just that they never find it, and Yixing always returns to what Baekhyun has started to think of as  _ home  _ with a disgruntled expression and fire in his sharp eyes, slamming the scratched green door closed harder than something that delicate can reasonably handle.

Days blur into weeks. One week is nothing but acidic, black rain, so irradiated with nuclear fallout still hovering low in the atmosphere that they can’t go out for fear it might melt holes in their clothes. They waste hours in the cabin, and Baekhyun shows Yixing magic tricks he learned to impress his college roommates. With deft fingers he flips a coin over his knuckles and then opens his fist to reveal nothing, only to pull the coin from behind Yixing’s ear. 

It’s the first time Yixing laughs. Baekhyun lets him keep the coin.

By the end of the week spent cloistered in the tiny cabin Baekhyun is so anxious to go outside again, to continue Yixing’s search for whatever it is he searches for, he almost forgets his mask. The safety of the cabin with its green door lulls him into a happier place, a place where the air  _ doesn’t  _ want to kill him, and Yixing only just grabs the back of his collar with a quick hand before he opens the door.

With his heart pumping adrenaline into his blood and Yixing’s fingers on his skin Baekhyun doesn’t even think. It’s too easy to take Yixing’s wrist and press a kiss to the hand that saved his life twice in two months, and Yixing makes it easier. With a small smile that says  _ what took you so long  _ he grasps Baekhyun’s chin lightly and it’s the first genuine touch Baekhyun’s felt since the bombs fell and the world burned to cinders. Baekhyun could burn to cinders under Yixing’s hand.

Eventually the rain clears, and the search begins anew. Around noon on the third day, only two weeks before Yixing’s slated to return to his compound, they find her.

She is to be their ruin, but Baekhyun doesn’t know at the time. 

The girl doesn’t speak, even under Yixing’s gentle hand and voice. She eats a little, but she is still far too thin to be healthy and much too small to be on her own. But it isn’t out of the ordinary to find children abandoned in the ghost cities. Baekhyun never learns her name, but Yixing keeps trying.

Baekhyun suspects she is what Yixing was looking for– a child, young, adaptable, who had survived the strikes. A child that may hold the key to future survival.

They find a small gas mask for her in Yixing’s collection of government issued equipment and take her with them on the daily explorations. Baekhyun notices she likes to collect colored shards of glass and shiny rocks, so the next time he sees a scrap of colorful jewelry he carefully ties the bracelet around her wrist. He can’t see her face behind the large mask, but he thinks she smiles.

They are camping by the river when the girl starts crying. She hasn’t ever cried before, and it almost gives Baekhyun a heart attack when the sound cuts through the night. Yixing is dead asleep, having sorted through rock samples for hours on end the day before. So Baekhyun tries to make out the girl’s eyes through the mask and calm her down. He can barely see the dark tears welling behind the tinted glass. 

And when he looks down, and sees the thorn-like bone spurs creeping out from her knuckles, stained red, his stomach drops. They found her too late. Frozen, Baekhyun can do nothing but watch as her tears quiet and her hands flex. With a small sigh, she rips off her mask, deftly snapping one of the leather straps.

Her tears have burned dark red streaks into her skin, poisoned with radiation, and her eyes are clouded over. Baekhyun wonders shakingly how long it will take for her to lose her sight completely. No more than a few days at most.

“Yixing,” she rasps, brokenly. Her clawed hands reach for his mask haltingly. “We can breath, Yixing, it’s ok.”

In the next heartbeat, as her fingers touch the edge of Yixing’s mask, Baekhyun pulls the trigger on a gun he hadn’t even realized he’d drawn, and Yixing’s eyes snap open just in time to see the girl’s hands fall limp against his neck.

The night rings with a silence louder than Baekhyun likes. He’s always hated the quiet.

… 

Baekhyun never repainted his mask, Yixing notices. The paint is still marred by the four jagged cuts slashing diagonally across the face, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

Yixing still has the same government-issued grey mask he had before everything went wrong, but whatever cheap paint they used is slowly flaking off to reveal the gunmetal silver underneath. It will reflect the sunlight blindingly, but he doesn’t have the heart to care. 

The sun has already seared through the ever present mist of dark fog that hangs heavy in the sky when they emerge from the compound, masks safely down and with clean filters attached. They should last up to five years even with constant use, but Yixing has extras anyway. 

Everything burns golden under the faint sunlight. Fallen buildings cast long shadows and it’s hard to tell whether the hills in the distance are ghosts of cities or simply grassy hills. There isn’t much of a difference anymore.

Twenty miles to the west there is a settlement, and between here and there are four ruins. Yixing hopes– for the first time in a long time, he  _ hopes–  _ he might be able to do some good. And in the settlement itself there may be those who have been abandoned. Yixing is a doctor, has a decent knowledge of medicine, even if he never finished med school. He probably can’t cure the rampant genetic mutations. But he can teach. He can help in small ways. The world is so much smaller now.

Two people can feel like a family.

Somewhere in the golden, dust-flecked hills, if he turns east at the river bend, is a cabin with a scratched green door. The succulents are probably still alive.


End file.
